Young Adult Fiction
Pushing open the car door, I dug my feet into the ground and took off for the gate. I could hear my social worker yelling, but then a huge roaring filled my ears. At the parking lot entrance, the horror movie gate still stood open, waiting for me.
I had to get away—that was all I could think about. The gate grew and grew, and then I was through it and out in the street. Everything in me pulled together and began to run, fast as my heart was beating, faster.
I stare over my fire to the west, across the desert plain I crossed today, at the barely discernable black outline of the mountains where I camped last night. The tiny flickering campfire out on the plain is the only light. Every night for the past five days I have seen this fire as darkness falls. There is probably a man sitting by it looking up at the light of my fire. Who is he?
Where I come from, kids are divided into two groups. White kids on one side, Indigenous on the other. Sides of the room, sides of the field, the smoking pit, the hallway, the washrooms; you name it. We're on one side and they're on the other. They live on one side of the Forks River bridge, and we live on the other side. They hang out in their part of town, and we hang out in ours.
